Here’s a crazy idea: How about a student visa program whose main beneficiary is Canada

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The reasons why Canada’s student visa system is broken are many: provinces eager to pass the buck on paying for higher education; universities, colleges and private operators grabbing for dollars; students from low-income countries discovering that bargain-priced tuition buys entry to Canada; businesses eager for cheap labour; and a federal government that smilingly enabled the whole mess and passed it off as a success.

But what really broke Canada’s student visa system was a failure of understanding.

Foreign students understand what they’re buying. Canadians never understood what we’re selling – or should be selling. That’s how we ended with something whose costs currently exceed its benefits.

However, if we start talking honestly about things, we can rewrite the equation to up the benefits to Canada, and lower the downsides.

So what is this business of offering Canadian higher education to non-Canadian students? It’s an export industry.

At first blush, that sounds strange. We usually think of an export as something shipped overseas, to a buyer who in return sends money to Canada. For example, this country’s largest export is energy products, which Statistics Canada says was worth $16.9-billion last September. We all know how it works: Canadian oil, gas and electricity go (mostly) to the United States, and billions of dollars come back to Canada in return.

Selling Canadian education to non-Canadians is that, but with a twist. The twist is that the purchasers don’t just send money. They also send themselves.

It wouldn’t be a bad idea to take advantage of Canada’s excellent international reputation to make this country a global leader in exports of high-priced, high-margin education. That’s what Canadians like to think we’re doing. But let’s be honest: It’s largely a lie.

Our exploding education-visa system – with more than one million visa holders at the end of 2023, triple the number in 2015 – has increasingly become a back door for entry into Canada, to work a low-skills and low-wage job, and to get on the citizenship ladder. That’s what many schools are selling. That’s what many foreign students are buying.

The approach has benefits – billions of dollars in tuition – but also big costs, including upward pressure on rental housing prices, extra pressure on public services such as health care and a flood of low-wage workers who have contributed to a hidden but very real recession in average incomes, revealed in six quarters in a row of declining per-capita gross domestic product.

Instead of a visa student program that maximizes tuition income, attracts the world’s brightest, raises the quality of Canadian education, fills gaps at the high end of the labour market and boosts the Canadian economy, we’ve built a visa monster that is largely doing the opposite. We’re selling the right to fill low-skill and low-wage jobs, under the guise of education, which is harming the economy and perverting our educational institutions.

Turning things around calls for doing far more than what federal Immigration Minister Marc Miller announced last month.

Allowing visa students to work an unlimited number of hours off-campus fed the business model for unscrupulous educational operators. Mr. Miller says that in the spring, he may reduce the work limit to 30 hours a week. He needs to go much farther. To end the tuition-for-minimum-wage-work trade, he has to end the right of visa students to work, with the exception of those in highly-paid jobs.

Similarly, post-graduation work permits should only go to those who’ve been offered a highly-paid job. All other graduates will have to leave Canada on graduation, their tuition having purchased education but nothing more. If you have a job offer paying at least, say, $75,000, you get the work permit. If not, you don’t.

One more thing: the feds should raise the cost of a student visa. It currently costs just $150. How about $5,000?

Those three simple steps would separate Canada’s educational wheat from the chaff. And it would do so without provinces and the feds having to micromanage which programs of study are worthy of student visas or work visas or post-graduation visas – a system rife with lobbying and the potential for corruption.

What I’m proposing would put the weakest institutions, public and private, out of the student-visa business. But it would strengthen the strongest and highest-quality institutions, including skilled-trades training programs, and even open new doors for them.

Many visa students are today trading a relatively low tuition price – $15,000 or less at many Ontario colleges – for the legal right to work a minimum-wage job. But if low-pay work is no longer allowed while enrolled, and post-graduation work permits for such jobs are similarly not available, and that path to permanent residency is thus closed, and a student visa costs $5,000 to boot, then foreign applicants for such programs will disappear.

However, programs offering a top-flight education, and demanding top dollar, won’t be much affected. At the University of Toronto, for example, tuition for international students in arts and science at the downtown campus is more than $60,000 a year. That’s not a back door to driving Uber Eats. That’s not a pathway to Tim Horton’s.